Kootenai Church Adult Sunday School

A Look at the Brief Christian Life (Luke 23:33–44)
Well, it would be a shock to nobody here to find out that the Bible is full of lots of stories. Indeed, the Bible is a massive collection of all sorts of stories, different genres, settings, characters. We see main characters like Abraham, Moses, and Job, side characters like Lot, Aaron, and Job's friends, and even smaller characters like Euodia and Syntyche from the book of Philippians, who get one inspired verse of mention in that book. We see Simeon from Luke 2, who met Jesus as an infant in the temple. And our tendency when we come to a passage like that is to kind of breeze over that character or that verse and kind of pay a lot more attention to the typical dos and don'ts of the book that we're studying.
This morning, I want to slow down just a little bit and really soak in one of these narratives. There's a saint you will meet someday. This man is mentioned in all four gospels, despite never coming into contact with any of the disciples and speaking merely one sentence to Jesus Himself. He appears at the climax of the gospel story, so it's fairly easy to put him in the background of our minds, made easier by the fact that we don't even know his name. But I think his life is one that's full of insight. And as we work our way through this narrative, I hope that we, if you are in Christ, are able to see your life in this man's life. And we can benefit greatly from a little bit slower of a look.
If you haven't already guessed, I'm talking about the thief on the cross in Luke 23. This is the shortest Christian life that we have documented for us in our Bibles. So today I've chosen not to take a brief look at a Christian life, but rather a look at the brief Christian life. Like I said, all four gospels make mention of this thief, but only Luke records the interaction between these three men on Calvary. So that's where we'll spend the majority of our time together. It's Luke 23, if you'll turn there with me this morning, starting in verse 33. Luke 23:33:
33 When they came to the place called The Skull, there they crucified Him and the criminals, one on the right and the other on the left.
34 But Jesus was saying, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” And they cast lots, dividing up His garments among themselves.
35 And the people stood by, looking on. And even the rulers were sneering at Him, saying, “He saved others; let Him save Himself if this is the Christ of God, His Chosen One.”
36 The soldiers also mocked Him, coming up to Him, offering Him sour wine,
37 and saying, “If You are the King of the Jews, save Yourself!”
38 Now there was also an inscription above Him, “This is the King of the Jews.”
39 One of the criminals who were hanged there was hurling abuse at Him, saying, “Are You not the Christ? Save Yourself and us!”
40 But the other answered, and rebuking him said, “Do you not even fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation?
41 “And we indeed are suffering justly, for we are receiving what we deserve for our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.”
42 And he was saying, “Jesus, remember me when You come in Your kingdom!”
43 And He said to him, “Truly I say to you, today you shall be with Me in Paradise.” (NASB)
So this is it. This is all we get of this guy, these eleven verses. We don't know his occupation, his name, his title, his ethnicity. We know him simply as the thief on the cross. And we see his eventual conversion. And within these eleven verses, we see, in fact, five events that play out by our thief. There are his conversion out of condemnation, his confrontation of the other criminal, his confession of his crimes, his confirmation of the holiness of Christ, and his confidence in the kingdom coming.
And before we get into the first point, I do want to lay a little bit more groundwork for this, and I want to front-load a grain of salt because like I said, there's a little bit of speculation that we have to engage in here. We need to be on guard of our hearts and make sure that we are taking the truth out of this text and not what is kind of out there in the open. And I will do my best to make it clear what is speculation, and it'll be obvious when we read the text.
Two misconceptions I want to address that we might bring to this text, and they're kind of really the two sides of one point, is we will try to see how much the thief knew before he met Jesus on the cross. So the one side of it is to kind of come to this text and maybe think that he knew nothing of Christ, he had never heard His name, and he just had this supernatural injection of a saving knowledge of Christ while he's on the cross. And the other side of that is that he knew Christ already and was even reconciled to Him and this was a believer who was put up on the cross next to Jesus.
So if we read from Matthew 27:38–40:
38 Two robbers were crucified with Him, one on the right and one on the left.
39 [And this is what we just read here in Luke] And those passing by were hurling abuse at Him, wagging their heads
40 and saying, “You who are going to destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save Yourself!” . . .
42 He saved others; He cannot save Himself. He is the King of Israel. Let Him now come down from the cross, and we will believe in Him. . . .
44 The robbers who had been crucified with Him were also insulting Him with the same words. (Matt. 27:38–40, 42, 44 NASB)
So the plural, both the robbers. This entire conversion took place on this cross. This was not something that he was predisposed to.
So that takes care of the one side there, but let's look at the other side of it. We can look at how much he would have known about this, and this is evident by what he says to Jesus. “Lord, remember me when You come into Your kingdom.” So he speaks of the kingdom, right? This is something that Jesus spoke of over a hundred times recorded for us in the synoptic gospels. He spoke of the kingdom more than basically any other topic that He was preaching on.
And we look in John 4:25, the woman at the well. She in speaking to Christ says, “I know that Messiah is coming (He who is called Christ).” So this was a Samaritan woman who knew of the prophecies to the Jews of the coming Messiah. So she was not part of that Jewish culture, but she would have known kind of the [inaudible] surrounding Christ as He was there carrying out His ministry. And later in the town, she's speaking to other Samaritan men. She says, “This is not the Christ, is it?” (v. 29). So she's not trying to teach about the Christ to other people. She's kind of assuming that they also know about the prophecies of a coming Messiah.
The last example of this is the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, if you remember that story, where Jesus is revealing Himself to two of His disciples on the road to Emmaus and He has supernaturally blinded their eyes so they don't recognize Him. They just see Him as another Jewish man traveling with them. And they're talking about Jesus and His crucifixion, and Jesus kind of coyly asks, “Hey, what are you guys talking about?” You know, He knows. And they say, “Are You the only one visiting Jerusalem and unaware of the things which have happened here in these days?” They couldn't believe that there was a guy around Jerusalem who hadn't heard of what was going on. So we see from these examples how basically everyone would have heard of Christ at this point, and the thief, speaking of the kingdom, proves he had a baseline knowledge of what was going on.
So with that, we'll dive into point one, his conversion out of condemnation. And we don't know exactly what was going on in the mind of the thief as he was hanging there on the cross. So this is the final six hours of the crucifixion. And we basically just see him mocking Him in Mark, and then we skip to Luke, and then he's rebuking the other guy. So kind of what's in the middle there is not given to us.
So here's a little bit of speculation. I think there's two options, one that might seem like a bit of a stretch for some of us, but one that we can definitely agree on. And the first is that he was either ethnically Jewish, he was raised Jewish, or at least had a very decent grasp of the Old Testament prophecies about Christ. There again, Christ fulfilled over three hundred prophecies in His ministry, one hundred Old Testament prophecies in His ministry. And ten of those were accomplished on the actual day or on the actual cross in front of these people.
And so there could have been a sense where you look at the beginning of Psalm 22 and Jesus quotes, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Matt. 27:46) That kind of would have kick-started people's thinking of these psalms, and five of these prophecies occur in Psalm 22. Verse 8—some of the psalm predicts the very words of the enemies of Christ who are scoffing and mocking Him: “Commit yourself to the Lord; let Him deliver him; let Him rescue him.” Verses 16–18: “A band of evildoers has encompassed me; they pierced my hands and my feet. I can count all my bones. They look, they stare at me; they divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots.”
So all of this is happening right in plain view of both of these thieves. They are able to look at this, and if their minds are inclined toward that—and there again, we don't know if he would have known that. It'd be possible he didn't have any Old Testament prophecy knowledge whatsoever. But there's a world in which he hears this and begins understanding what he's seeing on the cross and the piercing of the hands and the feet and the vinegar and all these things. Like, it's such a vivid picture. And he's not going anywhere. He's paying attention to all this stuff that's happening in front of him. So it's that process of realization and with help of the Spirit guiding his heart and his mind and seeing this and then kind of coming to that realization like, “Oh, hey, you know, this is the guy they're waiting for. This is the Messiah.” That's the first option.
The second option is that he simply looked at the character of Christ as He was being put to death and saw a Man that was calm. He didn't lash out. Jesus never recanted anything that He said. He went along willingly with the brutality the Romans had set up for Him that day. Our thief had to make a decision in witnessing this throughout the day. Is Christ a liar, a lunatic, or is He Lord? And this is obviously a well-known apologetic from C. S. Lewis, but it's definitely something that he would have had to face.
A lie is fun as long as you can benefit from it. The fame and the finances and the influence that Christ would have accrued—you know, Judas was in charge of the money and the treasury of Christ's ministries. There was obviously money coming into the ministry that they were divvying out to the poor and the disciples there. And if Christ wanted to benefit from that money, He certainly could have pilfered that. We saw Judas doing that. And so, you know, if He wanted that or He had, you know—even Peter knocking the guy's ear off in the garden, like He had disciples who were willing to do what He said. And so if He wanted to have this power and influence and money over all these people, if sordid gain was His goal, then yeah, a lie is great benefit to Him.
But being put to death for the lie, no lie is worth that. No one's brain values a lie and the benefits of a lie over their own life. And so as the day drags on and as the trial drags on and He realizes He's going to be put to death, He doesn't recant anything. And so that doesn't really line up with what a liar says or how a liar would act.
So He's a lunatic. He was indeed confused and deceived Himself. But you look at how consistent His message was, the numerous eyewitnesses to His miracles, and the fact that He doesn't recant anything and even after He's pinned to a cross says, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). This is not how a lunatic acts when he's being put to death.
So He is Lord. And we see the thief confess Christ's innocence here in a bit. And nobody is innocent, so this Man who is innocent must be who He claims to be, which is God. But we also see the thief was asking for salvation this whole time. He says, “Save Yourself and us,” right (v. 39)? So now his focus has shifted from the salvation of his physical body to the salvation of his soul. And remember, paradoxically, the only way that Christ could have saved anyone that day was not to save Himself from that.
And in this we see the love of Jesus. It was tempting. We see Jesus pray, “If this cup can pass from before Me, Lord, let it be.” And we see Jesus is able to be tempted in the wilderness. I'm sure He wanted to bring a host of angels to pull Him off that cross that day, but He stayed up there because He loves you. Do we have any questions about his conversion out of condemnation?
Point two is the next event. We see his confrontation of the other criminal. Verses 40–41: “But the other answered, and rebuking him said, ‘Do you not even fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed are suffering justly, . . . but this man has done nothing wrong.’” I don't think he's speaking of earthly condemnation here. He's speaking of spiritual condemnation because he leaves Christ out of that. He says, “You are under the same sentence of condemnation as me,” right? So that right there is a recognition of Christ's holiness.
And it's interesting to see him use the term “fear God.” Where does he get that? I think possibly from Matthew 10:28: “Do not fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.” And the thief fears God because he recognizes his wretchedness next to Christ's holiness. And that develops a healthy fear of the almighty God in his mind. And Luke calls this a rebuke, but it seems a lot less calculated than a rebuke. He's not saying, “No, you're wrong, yada yada.” You see this is the first thing he says. This is probably right after his conversion. And so he is recognizing his own fallenness, his own sinfulness, and then realizes the weight of that sinfulness, and now is shouting across to the other guy, “Dude, stop, do you not even fear God? Like, we're receiving just penalty for what we're doing. Stop heaping up judgment to yourself.”
In recognition of his folly in trying to reason with the other guy, we see just an action that makes sense in what he says. He understands what is coming for him and wants the best for the other guy who is living a similar lifestyle. These men were probably previous fellows, arrested for the same crime. Some translations say “insurrectionists,” so there's some coup here, some collaboration between the two of them, and so he's looking out for the well-being of this other guy. Any questions about this confrontation?
And point three and four go hand in hand. This is the confession of his crimes and the confirmation of the holiness of Christ. And I'll take these two points together because in the text they're separated by a comma, but they are also mirror images of the gospel. So Christians affirm the wretchedness of their own sin and the holiness of Christ, and only holy men can see God, and so there's that dilemma, that we need a substitutionary atonement for that sin. And this is the thief's confession: “We indeed are suffering justly, . . . but this man has done nothing wrong.” So in that right there we have “we are suffering justly,” and he's speaking of the physical suffering of his body and also looking forward to the spiritual suffering that he is going to endure once he realizes the wretchedness of his sin.
And so we have one man yelling at Jesus and mocking Him and the other one defending the innocence and holiness of Jesus, and this is all well and good, but let's not also forget what's happening here. These men are being crucified. Crucifixion was ultimately being nailed to a cross, but it wasn't strictly that. Flogging was a standard operating procedure, and some men were flogged so badly that they didn't even make it to the cross. They were beaten and whipped. And so the cross was part of it, and the cross would last several hours, sometimes several days. And so you're hanging, you're asphyxiating, you have blood loss, dehydration, sunburn, exposure to everything, and these men are arguing over who the man on the middle cross is? And I don't know about you, but I've stubbed my toe or I've hit my head on a truss at work or something, and someone tries to come up and console me, and I shoo them away. I just want to huddle up and just like take on the pain, right? The last thing I want to do is engage in a Christology debate. But why are they doing this?
I think the answer is found in Romans 6:13: “Do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God.” It’s slavery. These men are carrying out the duties called upon them by their masters. And this shows us that after justification and being freed from sin, we are not free to do whatever we want. God told Moses to tell Pharaoh, “Let My people go, that they may serve Me” (Exod. 8:1). We're never freed into a state of neutrality or being a law unto ourselves. We are freed—we are exchanging our master of sin to a master of righteousness.
And so no wonder, and we have instances—I'm sure many of you have had this experience—but when you're sitting next to somebody and the Spirit's telling you to share the gospel with them, and you're kind of fighting it back and forth, and there's almost something that comes over you, and you just open up that conversation. You start talking to them. That is slavery. I had the opportunity to share the gospel last year at a family reunion up in Canada, and the steps that laid out that gospel presentation were too clearly ordained to be ignored, and I'm sitting there. We're at the wedding feast part of it, and I'm sitting there. And I look down at my watch, and I'm realizing what I'm going to have to do—stand up in front of these, you know, twenty-five to thirty people and do this—and my watch is telling me that my heartbeat's reading 160 beats per minute. I'm sitting down. I'm a big guy, but I'm sitting down. Like, I shouldn't be this nervous for this.
And all my family could see how nervous I was, and one of my family members said, “You don't have to do this.” And I love this person to death, but they were wrong. This is an act that I was created to accomplish. How do I know this? Ephesians 2:10: “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works.” We were created for these good works that God lays out in our lives. This is the purpose of our lives. This is the purpose of the thief’s life—to accomplish the will of God.
And so what is the result of this confrontation? I think there are two results, one there again that's speculation and one that is not. What if the unrepentant thief had responded? I don't think there's any reason to think that the thief would have stopped mocking this guy and Christ once he had stood up to him. This is not how [unbelievers] act. They don't stop mocking Christ just because a Christian comes up and says, “No, hey, don't do that.” This is just, again, going back to the slavery. This is a repeated process.
And so the thief, seeing the reproach that Christ is getting—and not just from the other thief but all of the people and then the scribes and the Pharisees and the Romans, and everyone is mocking Christ. And now this thief is understanding, OK, if I line myself up with this guy, I'm putting a target on my own back. I'm just going to start heaping all this on top of me. And so his confrontation of the other thief was not just him looking out for him, but this was him aligning himself with Christ, willingly enduring the mockery that was going to come from them.
And remember that Luke was not an eyewitness to these events. And so all of this conversation between the thief and Jesus was part of the oral tradition of Christ before it was written down. So this was not just something that one person was there for and he heard this exchange and he wrote it down and then he ran away. This was widespread. And I think this could definitely be the case. He's fulfilling what Peter describes in his first Epistle: “Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal among you, . . . as though some strange thing were happening to you” (1 Pet. 4:12). He writes like suffering for Christ is a guarantee in the Christian life. And here we are in this hour-long, maybe a couple of minutes long, Christian life, and he is suffering reproach for Christ's name. He would completely have been able to take on all of this mockery and scorn that was aimed at Christ a second ago.
But what if the other thief did shut up, or if he just died right there? We established that our thief accomplished a righteous act since he was transferred out of the bondage of sin into the servitude of righteousness. So back to Romans 6, which is all about the concept of slavery. At the end of that chapter, verse 22: “Now having been freed from sin and enslaved to God, you derive your benefit, resulting in sanctification, and the outcome, eternal life.” So it's sanctification.
And it's beautiful to see God's hand of providence there. We look at the three men on the cross, and we need to understand they didn't just have three random people they needed to crucify that day. Even that was part of the mockery of the day that Christ suffered. It was the crown of thorns and the purple robe and the plaque that said “King of the Jews” and everything. So this, with Christ in the middle and people on either side of Him, was to mock a king and his counsel of counselors. Proverbs 16:9: “Man plans his ways, but the Lord establishes his steps.” These men thought that they were mocking Christ, but what were they doing? They brought up the Man in the middle. They brought up Christ. And Christ atoned for the sins of all mankind and brought salvation to the world. And they brought up the thief to meet his Shepherd. This was a man whose name was written in the book of life, and he had an appointment that day with his Shepherd. And they brought up the other man to serve as this man's instrument of sanctification.
And I want to contrast real quick the thief's faith in Christ's kingdom as opposed to the disciples. We go back to the road to Emmaus in Luke 24:21. The disciples were saying, “But we were hoping that it was He who was going to redeem Israel.” They've lost faith. They've lost hope in that. And by God's grace, the thief who is staring at this dead man affirms the kingdom. He doesn’t know exactly how this is going to happen, but he wasn't confused. They knew they weren't getting off those crosses. Romans were not bad at crucifixion. There's no hope that they were going to survive this. So knowing that he and the other guy were going to die affirms something afterward where Christ was going to rule in that kingdom.
It's interesting that he only asks to be remembered and not for salvation. He doesn't ask to participate in this kingdom either. It's possible that he thought he was only worthy of remembrance and not participation there, if you remember his recognition of the holiness of Christ. And just remember what happens when anyone recognizes the holiness of Christ. In Jesus's first interaction with Peter, remember Peter is not bringing up any fish. And then Christ says, “Throw your net on the one side,” and he hauls up a netful of fish that could sink the boat. And Peter says, “Depart from me. I'm a wicked sinner.” He recognizes Christ's ability to control physical creation and is undone by it. And the disciples in the boat, when the sea is raging up and Jesus is sleeping in the bottom of it and the disciples wake Him up and Jesus comes up and He calms the storm, did they feel better about what was going on? No, Mark says they became very much afraid because they no longer feared the physical world but the guy who could control the physical world.
And so with this thief and his recognition of his sin and even the crucifixion, which is the highest level of execution for his crimes and his sins, and recognizing the holiness of God, he doesn't feel worthy to be a participant in the kingdom. He just wants to be remembered. Do we have any questions about that?
A few more interesting things to consider before we look at Jesus's response is I think this is a cool one-sentence fulfillment of the requirements set forth by Paul in Romans 10:9–10: “If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved; for with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation.” So let's look at his confession—“Lord, remember me when You get Your kingdom.” That is his confessing Jesus as Lord and believing that God would raise Him from the dead.
And there again we have the benefit of history and other eyewitness accounts and testimonies in our Bible and Epistles written of men who saw Jesus and affirmed His resurrection. We can look to them and trust them. The thief didn't have any of that. He doesn't have a Bible, he's never been to a Bible study, and he affirms Christ's resurrection beforehand. I just think that's amazing.
And if you look at the order of events, it's interesting to see that his salvation came before his confession. So admittedly, the wind comes out of my sails looking at those Romans 10:9–10 verses because he ends up being converted and carrying out a righteous act before he is converted, we believe. And Paul, who wrote this verse in Romans, also says in Acts 16:31, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.” So is it the confession of Christ that saves you, or is it the belief in Christ that saves you? Yeah. I think that God ordains these things to happen simultaneously and before and after each other. There are set requirements for salvation, and if we look at the narrative, he believed in his heart, he believed in Jesus Christ, and was saved (Acts 16:31). He took action resulting in his sanctification (Rom. 6:22). Then he confessed with his mouth Jesus as Lord and confessed his belief in his heart that God would raise Him from the dead.
We don't serve a God of what-ifs, and so we can't look at this narrative and say, “OK, what if he had believed in his heart and then did the righteous act and then he didn't talk to Jesus, he didn't pray to Jesus, he didn't confess with his mouth Jesus as Lord?” We can't do any of that because we see these things are inexplicably, inseparably linked, the belief and the righteous act and the faith that without works is dead, and all of this is playing out in these three sentences that we see of our thief. But our method of salvation is exactly the same as this illiterate career criminal with one righteous deed to his name. Even us, with our completed Scriptures and our commentaries, our study Bibles, our writings of theologians, our small groups and catechisms, we are no more worthy to step into the sinless kingdom of God than this. The Man on the middle cross says we can come, and that's it. We don't need to know exactly what's going on. The thief didn't know exactly what was going on. He just put his faith in Jesus for salvation and allowed Jesus to accomplish that in the way that Jesus saw fit.
God doesn't rely on our knowledge to accomplish His purpose. And this is not to give us an excuse not to study or work these things out. We need to be diligent to know what God has for us, but we can't have an anxiety built up that I don't know enough about God or I don't know enough about this. The love of God should drive us to have those thoughts, but not a fear of our eschatology—“I don't know if Jesus is going to be able to come back if I don't know exactly what's going on and can articulate this super well and debate this with everybody,” right? The favor has been won for us. And even if we live for a mere hour or a minute with our hope fixed on Christ, in that favor, we will be saved.
I did promise we were going to look at the full Christian life, so I can't get out of here without mentioning the ordinances of baptism and communion. He didn't have the opportunity to partake in either of these things. And that doesn't mess with our doctrine or theology at all, so we'll give that a pass. I will say briefly that I think it's interesting to look at kind of the benefit of baptism. So what we have in baptism is a public declaration of our faith and a public association of ourselves to Christ. And there again, that's what the thief did with his affirmation to a hostile crowd of, “No, I'm with this guy.”
Lastly, I want to look at Jesus's response to our thief. Next week, we're singing the song “Jesus, Thank You.” And the end of that chorus always sticks out to me. “Once Your enemy, now seated at Your table. Jesus, thank You” (Sczebel). We affirm the predestined nature of our salvation, but that doesn't preclude us from being enemies of God before we reach that justification, right? We are unreconciled to God before our salvation. We are enemies with God until we are saved. Once we take hold of that righteousness Jesus has won, then we are welcomed in as sons and can receive eternal life.
And in the same way, our thief who was lashing out against Jesus in slander and blasphemy was an enemy to God at that moment. And Christ in His omnipotence knew that. He knew this man who was coming up next to Him, and He endured the mockery and scorn and then watched him convert, watched him carry out this act of righteousness on the other guy. And He was pleased to see all of this. He was happy. There was no level of, “Oh, you were just the guy mocking Me and now you want to be welcomed into the kingdom and all this stuff?” There's no hesitancy for Christ. “You will be with Me in paradise.” That's it. It's right there.
Imagine if you were walking down the street and a random guy came up to you and just starts pointing out, “Hey, I hate your clothes, and I think the car you drive is outdated, and I heard from this guy and this guy that you're a liar and you stole this and you were doing this, and I don't like the friends that you hang out with,” and then he ran off. And we're taken aback, right? And you continue walking down the street and you maybe walk another block and the guy comes around the corner again. He's like, “Hey, man, I'm really sorry about all the things I said just now. I don't think any of those are true. I don't know where that came from. Can I borrow twenty bucks?” How would you respond to that?
But how does Jesus respond? He says, “My Father is the richest man in the history of the world, and I am the rightful sole heir to everything that My Father has. And since I can tell your apology is sincere, not only will I give you that twenty dollars, but I will give you everything that My Father has for Me in equal measure.” How dare we not forgive the people who wrong us when we have been forgiven for doing so much worse to Someone so much greater? Ephesians 3:20: “Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think”—we read that as the benediction here every couple weeks. The thief certainly got more than he expected, right? He expected remembrance, and he was brought into an unthinkable paradise and is enjoying the reward for his righteous act as we speak.
I hope that as we've gone through this, I've walked through not just the Christian life but our own as well. We see justification, an act of slavery to righteousness resulting in sanctification, a confession of his sins, an affirmation of Christ's holiness as well as his confidence in Jesus receiving a kingdom, possibly suffering reproach for Christ's name—we'll give that a half point, right?—and a public announcement of faith.
Another thing that I want to look at is discipline. We think of discipline as the loving correction of sins, but that's not always how it goes. Christ is able to use all sorts of methods for our discipline, and that can be positive discipline or discipline in order to correct our sins. But we see the thief suffering and identifying correctly that he is suffering justly for his sins under the judgment of the Roman Empire. But once that justification takes place, God can take that suffering and use it for the moral formation of this man's character and sanctify him into a further image of Christ Himself. And in that discipline, he receives affirmation of his sonship and he dies, resulting in glorification.
So there again with discipline, we receive discipline and we look at the sufferings and the trials in our lives and we think, you know, this is such a horrible thing that's happening to us. But a healthy view of discipline is, you know, God loves me enough to discipline me out of this sin or to discipline me in this situation. And so the thief hears Jesus say, “Today you'll be with Me in Paradise.” That's a pretty solid affirmation of his sonship. And I'm sure we'd all love to hear that at some points in our life, but we receive the same affirmation of our sonship when we go through trials and discipline.
Let's not forget the other thief, the one who hung face-to-face with the Savior of humanity for six hours. He had the exact same scenario play out in front of him. He knew the claims of Christ and witnessed His character as He was put to death. He had every opportunity to admit to his crimes, to place his faith in a holy God, and to receive blessings incomprehensible to us. And in his pride he rejected it all and chose to die in the same way he lived.
J. C. Ryle in his commentary on the gospel of Luke says, “One thief was saved so that no sinner might despair, but only one thief that no sinner might presume.” If you are sitting here today and you've not put your hope in Jesus for salvation, look to the thief on the cross. As long as there is breath in your lungs, there is still time to repent and come into the kingdom, but do not look to the thief on the cross and presume you have tomorrow to figure it out. The thief had a little bit of foresight to be able to see about when he was going to die, you know, roughly, within a few hours, but you are one distracted driver away from facing the Almighty God. Will He see you as one of His sons, or will you face Him as an object of His judgment?